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How Iran Hawks Spread Misinformation

Iran has so far complied with the agreement it made last year.
Rouhani

Bret Stephens just makes things up:

Iran came to the table cheating on its nuclear commitments. It continued to cheat on them throughout the interim agreement it agreed to last year [bold mine-DL]. And it will cheat on any undertakings it signs.

This was reported yesterday:

Iran has taken the necessary steps to continue to comply with an interim nuclear agreement, according to a U.N agency report seen by Reuters on Monday, as Tehran and six world powers gave themselves an extra seven months to clinch a final deal.

The International Atomic Energy Agency issued its monthly update on the preliminary accord’s implementation on the same day that Iran and the major powers agreed to extend that deal until June, after failing to meet Monday’s deadline for a comprehensive settlement.

Stephens builds an entire column around an easily-checked falsehood, and without it everything else he says falls apart. In other words, it’s just another Stephens column, but it is a useful window into the thinking of a foreign policy hard-liner. Hard-liners take it as a given that the other party to any agreement is always cheating. They assume all agreements with regimes they dislike to be inherently worthless, which is why they are so hostile to any diplomatic effort to engage with these regimes. Hard-liners cannot imagine the possibility that the other government would comply with the requirements of an agreement out of self-interest, and so they simply assume that it has been cheating on an agreement even when it has been proven otherwise. It’s not at all surprising that hard-liners spread misinformation, but it is remarkable that their baseless arguments continue to be taken seriously in spite of this. It is always possible that Iran will fail to comply with some portion of a future comprehensive deal, but that is not a reason to give up on diplomacy. It is significant that Iran has so far complied with the agreement it made last year. That is as good a foundation for continued negotiations as one could want, which is why opponents of any deal are so keen to misrepresent what has happened in order to make further talks seem futile.

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